The whisper of the axe

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Inspired by someone on my flist exercising caution based on experience and thus not dying in a horrible car wreck]

The closest I've ever come to just being flat-out no take-backs killed involved the route I took home from grade one. We lived in the tutor's residences on Columbia Street. My school was five or six blocks away up Columbia [1] and there were train tracks about a third of the way from home to school. One day I was walking home, tripped just short of the tracks and as I stood back up, a train came through. I could have covered the distance between me and the tracks in the time it took me to get up.



1: Or much longer via a "short cut" I discovered, which looped all around UW campus and took me by the Tuck Shop in V1 (which was only useful if I'd remembered to hide my money: the teacher used to confiscate any loose change the kids had for some charity or other].

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

One of my brother's ex-bosses once jogged through a stand-off between armed robbers in a building on one side and armed cops behind cars on the other. I guess it didn't occur to the cops to block off both ends of the street where the siege was happening.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

My dad once got off the streetcar and stepped right into a standoff between the police and a rooftop sniper.

The police had blocked off car traffic but let the transit vehicles go through.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

One of my old customers walked into a bank that was being held up, used the bank machine and then walked out, where he was grabbed and hauled off to safety by the cops. The guys with guns in the bank apparently just stood there waiting for him to notice the masks and guns, which he didn't.